dankmemes | Test Drive Meme #24

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!test drive

Test Drive Meme #24

Welcome to Hadriel's test drive, and thank you again for your interest in the game! As always, our reserves page is here, and our applications page is here! Reserves open September 24th, and apps are open October 1st. Please remember that there is an app cap of 20 apps.

Two quick points here as well:
1. Any thread made in Hadriel's test drive will be accepted as the sole Action Log sample in the application.
2. All threads made in the test drive can be considered game canon, either through handwaving or through a shared mental experience while coming through the Door!

Test drives will be broken up into specific god mini-events, during which your characters can see how well they fare under the watchful eye of one of the gods. Choose wisely or just simply pick 'em all, and have fun!

F E A R

SCENARIO ONE: TITAN TERRORS
[The Door brings in all that is chaotic and evil in the world. This may include you, may include the person next to you... and may include the monster behind you.

In this case, the monster behind you may as well be the monster above you. No, not anything flying overhead, but the freakishly giant nude monsters hellbent on shoving your crunchy body into their mouths and chowing down.

Titans are large humanlike creatures who have superior strength, though more limited intelligence. Much like zombies, they desire only to devour all of the humans in their vicinity and will use any tools at their disposal to do so. Get your steel guitars ready and get pumped, because sie sind das essen und wir sind die jager!!!]

R A G E

SCENARIO TWO: PAINTBALL ROYALE
[You've got a gun.

Okay, it's not a real gun- it's actually a paintball gun, which seems to knock people unconscious when you hit them. That's a pretty sweet deal! Except, you really want to be the last one standing, and you'll knock out countless people to do it. Every fight feels like life or death, whether you're waiting in the shadows to get the drop on someone or spraying paint all across the open streets in the fain hopes that you might get a tag or two.

Either way, if you lose, you'll find yourself waking up in a party! That's not so bad, right? It's a giant gathering of all the paint-covered losers in the city, with free food and drinks and a distribution of excellent prizes. What did you win? Fight your friends, but not in the dark and trauma-y way, and be the next winner of our Hadriel death (not really) match!

This is a mini version of our Party Royale event this month.]

C O N F U S I O N

SCENARIO THREE: WALK WALK FASHION BABY
[Your trusty leather jacket is gone. So are your worn and torn jeans, all your summer dresses, your boots and high tops and heels. Suddenly, nothing is where you expect it to be, not even that load of clothes that you've left in the laundry for the past few weeks (oops). In the stead of all of your beloved duds, you find some stuff that... might be a little questionable.

Whether you were the lucky recipient of the hand shawl, the face skirt, the suspender sweats or some other wild atrocity, you'll be sure to have some fun trying to maneuver around the city in your weird, cumbersome outfits. At least you don't look as silly as that guy over there in the sea urchin costume!]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Ephemera rocks on his heels unhappily, trying not to squirm and pace like he wants to. He hates holding still, waiting for an enemy to pass judgement on the past, on the people he loved. That he still loves, so desperately it hurts sometimes, when he looks to the side and doesn't find them standing there. Connie could have been a part of that. She almost was. Chica and Rodriguez had been suspicious of her to the bitter end, but CT said, no. She's one of us. He'd been ready to make a place for her in their little family and Ephemera had always trusted CT's judgement. He'd been a good CO. Harsh, but fair when it mattered.

A good brother. And anyone his brother loved was family too, in Ephemera's book.

He could have loved Connie, he thinks. In time. If she hadn't died.

Yeah, well. Too fucking late for that.

Washington turns the page. He sounds stupidly sincere, like he really does want to know and remember.

Ephemera kicks at the floor. "Barrows. Your friends ripped his arm off."

The sketch is grinning, eyes bright with humor.

"He snuck a cat into our pelican once. It didn't have a tail. His sisters were ODST too, but they got fucked up. Sent half his pay to them every month."

Barrows. A cat without a tail, sent half his pay to his sisters. Wash remembers the guy with the mechanical arm... ripping it off and offering it to help a woman up and then dropping both into the water. It wasn't him who did it, but it had been his team. So for all intents and purposes right now... yeah.

He files the information away and studies the sketch a moment longer, wonders at how much emotion Sharkface managed to put into the image.

"How did he lose the arm in the first place?" he asks, genuinely curious.

He doesn't even remember. Ephemera digs his nails into his palm hard, until it almost draws blood and he can feel it for real. The mothefucker doesn't remember what he did. Doesn't even know--

Stop. Focus. Breathe.

Ephemera bares his teeth, not a smile.

"Oh, you did that too, freelancer. Dropped a building on him. Blast took his arm, broke most of his ribs."

How was he supposed to know which one Barrows was, before the mechanical arm? That's the point of this exercise, isn't it?

Wash grimaces.

"Don't call me Freelancer. It's just Washington."

A pause.

"Was it the same building you were in?"

"Fuck you."

None of this is a joke. Washington better know that.

Ephemera eyes him suspiciously, then nods. Same building, same bad goddamn day. A lot of people died in that mess. He didn't know most of them. "So what?"

He doesn't care much about what happened to him in that building. He lived. His family didn't. That's the problem. That's Washington's fault.

--what. What did he say now? Of course it's not a fucking joke, he's putting himself through the wringer here. Like he didn't have enough guilt over the people he'd killed that hadn't deserved it. Over his friends he hadn't saved. Over being one of the only survivors.

They had that in common, actually. Being the survivors. For so long, before Carolina showed herself, he thought he was the only one.

"I was just wondering."

And he turns the page. Who's next?

God, Ephemera wants to hit him. Grab him by the hair and smash his head into the wall until he gets what he fucking did, him and the other freelancers.

Ephemera twitches. Digs his nails into his arm hard. He doesn't want to imagine that maybe, just maybe, Washington already knows.

The next picture is--

He looks away. Swallows hard. The twins. Both of them professional soldiers, armored up but smiling like little kids. Sitting next to each other, flowers in their hair. Laughing. Trying so hard to always be smiling for everyone. The rest of the squad took turns watching over them, making sure nothing could sneak up on them again. Corner them without their armor.

"Dane and Daisy. The chain gunners. Called them the twins. They stopped talking, our second tour. UNSC was gonna boot them out."

Ephemera digs his nails in again, as hard as he can. He can feel blood under the sleeve of his sweatshirt. It's not enough. He always gets angry thinking about what happened to the twins, how their superiors tried to brush them off. Mental deficiency brought on by trauma. Motherfuckers. Six years, Daisy and Dane never said a word. Not a single one.

"Insurrection couldn't sign us up fast enough, after that."

If Sharkface can't tell that he's genuine here, that's a problem. Because he is. And with each face the guilt grows heavier. He doesn't looks up to see the blood blossoming on Sharkface's cuffs, though, just studies the faces. Memorizes them. Dane and Daisy, went silent. Probably some kind of severe ptsd. Wash can relate to that.

He remembers fighting them, the way they laughed maniacally as they shot. They were broken and never got the chance to heal. But they'd had a family looking out for them.

Wash stays quiet for awhile on this one, finally lifting a hand off the sketchbook and rubbing his face. "Did all of you join together from the UNSC?"

Ephemera nods, clamping his hand tight over his wrist. It stings now, with the blood. Once it would have been enough to keep him focused, keep him centered on his objective. Once, before he had nerve damage, before all the shit went down and he lost his center.

There's an objective here. Washington is the enemy. He has to be the enemy. Because if he's not, then--

"Yeah. CT was our captain. Maybe he did some shit, maybe we killed some fuckers, but they had it coming." He lifts his chin, eyes narrowed tight. "They fucking deserved it for what they did to us."

Wash hesitates -- he doesn't disagree with the sentiment that some people just need to die, some people deserve it, but he has to wonder what else Sharkface deems worthy of death.

"What did they do?" he asks, looking up from Dane and Daisy to see Sharkface clutching his wrist. The blood on his fingertips.

He doesn't comment.

Strangely, no one has asked that before. It wasn't important. Charon needed fighters and if they came highly trained and ready to deal out damage, all the better. Personal motivations were secondary, if that. All that mattered was your willingness to kill some motherfuckers on command.

Ephemera bares his teeth in a sneer.

"They lied."

The UNSC is very good at that.

"Simple job. Insurrectionists had a base on a planet somebody else wanted. Got dropped plane-side, had to blow some shit up. No witnesses. Knew it was too fucking easy the moment we started. The guards had shit armor, no ammo. Not soldiers at all. They were just some dumb kids trying to stay alive."

He twitches. Grabs his wrist hard. He doesn't tell people about this part. It doesn't matter anymore.

"CT radioed back, said there'd been a mistake, we'll wait for extraction. Command said sure, our bad. And then they dropped a warhead."

Cut their losses. Or tried to.

Ephemera shivers. Grins.

"They knew it was a refugee camp. They knew the whole fucking time. Of course we fucking killed them. Every last one of them on the ship."

Yup. That falls under 'deserved to die' in Wash's book. And there was an insight there, as to why Sharkface's team joined the Insurrectionists.

Wash himself has no love left for the UNSC. He might have joined Freelancer willingly (sort of... he'd had no other choice, nowhere else to go with his history) but the UNSC sold soldiers to them for the Director's games. People who were now his friends. Good people. Maybe not good soldiers, but good people.

All these organizations were shit. The UNSC, Freelancer, Charon, everybody. They were all just working for their own gain, and didn't care about their soldiers. You had to look out for you and yours entirely on your own, back in their world. Couldn't trust anyone. Wash was lucky enough to get a new team, a new family. Sharkface wasn't. Wash looks at Dane and Daisy's smiling faces and feels vaguely ill.

He breathes out, glancing up to meet Sharkface's gaze, and nods once. He understands.

Washington doesn't say a damn word. He just listens and when it's done, he nods. A soldier listening to the sit-rep, drawing his own conclusions.

And there's so much of Ephemera that wants to hate him, to see him dead and broken on the ground for disrespecting the fallen, but he hasn't. He's listening.

Ephemera doesn't know what he's supposed to do with that. It wasn't part of the plan. He came in here expecting a fight. Hoping for one, really.

This is almost worst. Looking at Washington and seeing something like understanding.

He looks away. "Tried to make it right for a while."

There's a reason he has redemption tattooed across this chest. For a long time, they'd tried to do the right thing. Balance out their karma and shit like that, before they figured out none of it mattered and the only thing a person could really do in the world was look after their people. Ephemera twitches. "Don't want to talk about that. You're supposed to be looking."

There are more drawings. He doesn't know all their faces yet.

Wash saw the 'redemption' tattoo earlier, in the shop. It's just another piece of the puzzle that is Sharkface, the puzzle he never bothered to put together before because they just didn't have the time to deal with this shit. With one more person who wanted them dead. But there's a person standing in front of him now, who might not be reasonable or healthy but is doing what Wash asked him to. A person. Not just an enemy.

"I'm looking. I'll remember them," he promises, as much for himself as Sharkface.

He turns the page. Waits.

They'll see about that. Ephemera eyes Washington with open suspicion, but doesn't go for his gun. They made a deal. It'd be easier if one of them just broke it already, much simpler to have an enemy to target and destroy rather than deal with another person. Ephemera never was much good with people. He got lucky with CT and the others, found a family that always had his back. The rest of the world never seemed too concerned with that. Most people are out for themselves and nothing else. Even the Insurrection hadn't turned out any better then the UNSC, in the end. So then there was prison and there was Charon and there was Felix with his sneering offer - fight for your armor, or die right there with the rest of the ship.

It'd been an easy choice. There hadn't been much point in dying while the Freelancers were still alive.

Ephemera doesn't believe in causes these days. He wanted to, once. Had liked the feeling of standing for something bigger. Now all he has are people and they've gone and died, left him alone.

He thinks about the people he has here. Drake. Lup. That weird doctor. They're worth protecting, he thinks. And, in the end, it wouldn't matter if he killed Washington. It wouldn't change anything.

"That's Rodriguez," he says, quietly. The drawing is sharper than the others, more angles, harsher light. There were a lot of things about Rodriguez that Ephemera hadn't liked. He'd gotten mean towards the end. Killed things for fun. "The sniper. He was a bastard. Stole everybody's cigarettes. But he'd wait, whenever somebody got hurt. Got into fights with the medics if they weren't fast enough. He broke a vending machine with a rock one time to steal candy for the twins."

Rodriguez. It didn't sound like Sharkface was as fond of this guy, but that's how family was sometimes. You loved them even if you didn't always like them.

A sniper. It makes him think of North briefly, and sadness flickers over his expression. North hadn't deserved what he got. None of them did, but. Maybe if Wash had gotten there sooner... if he hadn't been locked up going crazy while his friends were slaughtered. He breathes, steels his expression back to something neutral. This is harder than he'd thought it was doing to be.

He turns another page.

"Knife specialist. Called her Chica."

Ephemera rocks back on his heels.There are three drawings one the page. One of her with her hair up in a bun, applying lipstick. A sketch of her in profile, balancing a knife on her hand. And the one where she's dead on an anonymous beach, slumped on her side, hair obscuring everything but the sharp line of her cheek. He included that one to drive the knife in a little deeper. Make Washington hurt for what he did.

It's justified, Ephemera thinks. It has to be.

Maybe. But it hurts, looking over at the page and seeing her like that. Even if he drew it.

"Prettiest woman you ever saw. And she worked at it. Always had lipstick on, even when we were jumping."

He closes his eyes. Just for a moment.

"She was one of my training officers, when I was just some idiot kid. She and CT, they look after me.:

Chica, okay. Wash wonders if her death scene is accurate or just an imagining -- had that been the woman they dropped off the dock? Had she drowned during that battle? He doesn't ask Sharkface. It doesn't really matter the specific battle they'd killed her in, she was dead.

"None of my team really wore makeup," Wash comments idly, looking at the sketch of Chica putting on lipstick. "Sometimes on shore leave. But we hardly ever got that." He vaguely remembers Connie's eyes lined dark in dim bar lighting, a stain on South's lips that she left behind on her shot glasses. They wore makeup for other people. This woman, Chica, she must have worn it for herself. Interesting.

"Did she teach you to jump?"

"Yeah."

And she'd been a taskmaster, absolutely merciless. Nasty as a drill sergeant when you fucked up. Most of the cadets had hated her guts. Ephemera had too, at the beginning. But then they'd gone up to jump the first time and she let him stay there for a moment in the drop ship, just watching the way the sky changed color. And he'd realized she was a perfectionist, but not cruel like some of the other instructors.

She'd used a different name back then, but Chica was the first person Ephemera had ever looked at and thought, this is what it's like to have a sibling. He hadn't seen her die, but he'd made CT tell him the whole thing, how he'd dragged her out of the sand. How she'd drowned, sucked down by her armor. Someone had cracked her skull open during the fighting, knocked her helmet off. She was probably unconscious when she went into the water.

That's probably a good thing. Ephemera read up on drowning, after. It's supposed to hurt.

"I never had family before. But she was my sister."

Wash has three sisters. This is... difficult. And he wants to say he's sorry, but knows how well that went over when Carolina tried. No matter how much he means it, it could turn this whole encounter south. So he doesn't say it. Just thinks it as he nods and turns the page away from the image of the drowned woman -- trying not to think of the Meta. Of Maine, another friend lost. But he'd died without anyone noticing, long before the Meta drowned.

He doesn't bring any of this up. He's not stupid.

Who's next?

Washington doesn't say a word. Ephemera breathes. Digs his nails into his wrist again to make himself focus. It's fine. It's fine, he's fine, they're--doing this.

Remembering the dead. Someone should remember them.

He clears his throat. It wasn't supposed to be this hard. Remembering them. Talking about them in front of Washington, who should be an enemy.

God, he misses them so much.

"Crow," he says, softly. The big guy, tallest of them all. Bulldog face, nasty scar splitting his forehead. Always had his arms bare because he said it intimidated people when he lunged at them. "He had a thing for old world puzzles. Rubik's cubes and that sorta thing. He used to con people when we'd go out on shore leave. He looked like a moron, so nobody thought he could do 'em fast, you know? We timed him once. Finished that fucker in twenty three seconds. Didn't use his HUD to cheat, either."

Ephemera rocks back on his heels. He doesn't want to do this anymore. It hurts.

"My family."

There's only one left: CT.

Crow. A rubik's cube in 23 seconds. Wash files that away with all the rest. A face, a name, a detail, their personality. He won't forget. He never forgets. But he can tell that Sharkface is wearing down so he turns the page, and there's only one person it could be. The leader, the one Connie was involved with.

"CT," he breathes out, studying the sketch. A man with a short stripe of a mohawk and 5 o'clock shadow. Wash had actually seen him without his armor in person before, when they reclaimed Connie's armor out in the desert, but he was. Less handsome, let him say. The seal on the armor served to preserve him a bit, enough that he recognizes him from the sketch, but. Yeeeeeah.

"He was your CO from the start?"

Ephemera nods. He's twitching again, knocking his shoulder against the wall. Doesn't want to be here, around Washington. Remembering all this shit. He wants to wake up back with the others, with CT and Chica and all of them alive and at his side. But wanting that doesn't get him anything, doesn't bring them back, and he promised that he'd remember.

If he can't avenge them, then at least he can make Washington remember too.

"Yeah," Ephemera says. Then, louder: "Yeah, he was! He was a good captain. He protected us. He got -- he got fucked up, after Connie. But he came back for me. He came back."

Ephemera twitches unhappily.

"I couldn't fight. Nobody had his back and he fucking died. I was supposed to die with them, do you understand that? Do you get it?"

Yeah. Yeah, he can make Wash remember. Every name and face is another weight on his shoulders, another heap of guilt over the things he did with Freelancer. He looks up at Sharkface when the other soldier gets emphatic, and really listens.

Wash has never had a good CO. In that way, Sharkface was lucky, but for the pain of losing him.

No shit the guy got fucked up, he put on her armor and started going by CT. His death isn't one that Wash was involved in, not really, but it was still due to Freelancer. To Epsilon. Wash figures he's lucky he wasn't killed by Epsilon as well, one way or another. Even if a part of him did die from him. He's still not over that, even working alongside the AI for so long now.

At the end of the day Freelancer destroyed everything it touched. Including him. Including Sharkface.

Yes, he understands.

It's survivor's guilt, he knows, looking at Sharkface now. Something in common, since he's felt it too, especially back when he thought he was the only one left. That he should have gone down with the others. Slowly, he's learned to live again, to be grateful he's alive rather than thinking his continued existence was some kind of curse. And he wonders if Sharkface can learn that too.

"I get it," he says earnestly. "It takes a long time, but. You can go from 'I was supposed to die with them' to 'I have to live for them.' Because that's what they'd want. And it seems like... you could have a life here."

Not back home, because Wash filled him full of lead. But here.

"Don't," Ephemera warns, sharply. He doesn't want to hear that from Washington. Not right now. Maybe never. They can't fight and most of the time Ephemera knows it's pointless, most of the time the logic sticks and he remembers that nothing would change, it wouldn't get him anything worth keeping. A moment of sick satisfaction to see Washington's eyes go dull or a take a bullet between his own eyes, nothing more. They'd fight and somebody would win and the other fucker would die and that would just be it. Until they started it all up again and then--

His hands are shaking. He forces them to flatten, not to grab for a knife.

"Keep it," he says instead, jerking his chin at the book. "You get to live with them now."

Test Drive Meme #24

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